Mary Hood (born September 16, 1946) is a fiction writer of predominantly Southern literature, who has authored three short story collections – How Far She Went, And Venus is Blue and A Clear View of the Southern Sky – two novellas – And Venus is Blue (also the title of her second short story collection) and Seam Busters – and a novel, Familiar Heat.

At the age of two, Hood and her family moved from coastal Brunswick to White, Georgia, where they briefly lived with her maternal grandfather, Claude Montgomery Rogers, who was a Methodist minister.

Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Douglas County, and, subsequently, multiple other places across rural north and south Georgia.

Hood lived in Woodstock (in the small lake community of Little Victoria on the banks of Lake Allatoona) for 30 years, where she witnessed the small, rural town turn into a bedroom community for burgeoning Atlanta – much of which is fictionally chronicled in her short story collection And Venus is Blue.

Kennesaw State University in Georgia named her the Writer of the Decade in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Contemporary Literature and Writing Conference.

Mama's third cousin – dead before my time – found his railroad watch in that eight-pound catfish's stomach the next summer just above the dam.

[11] Mary Hood's work has been tapped by Hollywood – with interest in How Far She Went by Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Sydney Pollack.